The Glenbow Museum gift shop recently unveiled its collection of handmade treasures created by local Etsy artists.

The pairing of these two realms feels organic, fated even, and speaks to the museum’s continuing role in hosting artists to connect with its historical pieces and share their experiences, making the artifacts relevant, relatable and accessible to us.

Founded in an apartment in Brooklyn, New York in June 2005, Etsy (etsy.com) is an online marketplace where crafters, artists and collectors sell their exquisite handmade and vintage goods to buyers around the world. Today there are 1.6 million sellers; the annual gross merchandise sales for 2015 was $2.39 billion.

In August, Etsy issued an open call to its Alberta artists (who create handmade and ‘vintage’ styled items sold on the Etsy website) inviting them to create new works inspired by the museum’s Canadian artifacts. Twenty-four out of 83 applicants were selected to take a private tour of Glenbow’s collection of fine arts and cultural history in storage.

Bill Guse of Master Ark didn’t initially see anything in the museum that spoke to him, rather thinking the artifacts reminded him of his grandmother’s belongings. But when the medieval jewelry artist discovered the multicultural collection of shields, he knew he’d base his creations on them.

Etsy medieval pendants by Bill Guse of Master Ark.Glenbow Museum /
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“Shields have defended warriors, protected kingdoms, and fought off marauders for millennia. As a maker of talismans I found this symbolism irresistible,” says Guse.

The Persian and buffalo head Siksika shield pendants he designed for the Glenbow reference time periods, cultures and styles he wouldn’t typically draw upon. His bronze and silver cloak clasps, brooches and pendants hail from Celtic, Saxon and Norse designs as well as the work of other craftsmen from 600 to 1,000 AD. Stretching the artists in different ways was indeed the beauty of this project.

The museum’s selection committee juried the artists’ proposed designs and 14 finalists were then given six weeks to produce an item to be sold in the Glenbow gift shop. The time crunch and adrenalin rush lended the challenge with that Project Runway feel.

The gift shop is now selling the artists’ final products of jewelry, paper goods, glassware and fashion accessories.

Calgarian Leonie Vatter of Maple and Oak Designs created a drawstring pouch from vintage and reclaimed fabric, inspired by a satin coin purse that Mrs. Margaret Lazier of Belleville, Ont., wore when she was presented to Queen Victoria in 1880. (She and her husband Colonel Samuel Lazier apparently made a trip around the world and brought back tropical birds, which they donated to the London Zoo. It was this donation that led to the meeting with the Queen.)

Calgary’s Matthew Bagshaw of RPS Creations had a following coming into the museum with his whimsical wearable paper art masks. While Pokemon and other anime characters are his signature masks, Bagshaw found inspiration from the depictions and sculptures of the province’s wildlife and created DIY paper art mask-making kits of bison, elk and moose. The rock-paper-scissor artist has also created huge papercraft hippo installations for music festivals such as Astral Harvest near Driftpile, Alta., and the Atmosphere Gathering in Cumberland, B.C.

Etsy has previously collaborated with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Natural History Museum in London, and the Melbourne Museum. The Glenbow is the first museum that Esty has partnered with in Canada. This project nudges the Etsy artists out of their creative comfort zone and helps them arrive at an appropriate price point for their goods in a retail setting.

In order for a museum to be contemporary and relevant it has to do better than merely dusting off old stuff and ascribing it importance based on those terms alone.

“A major part of what we do is invite people to interact with the collections, connect with them and tease out interesting stories to create and share something new,” says Jenny Conway Fisher, Glenbow’s manager of marketing and communications.

Over the years the Glenbow has collaborated with such artists as Paul Hardy, Corb Lund, Juno artists and Kris Demeanour to act as intermediaries between the museum’s relics and the public. And this latest partnership with the Etsy artists of Alberta continues to support and showcase local artists and the theme of creating new from old.

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